At present, many homes and businesses have a small network of computer systems (machines) with various peripheral devices coupled to the computer systems. A network administrator can configure the peripheral devices for sharing, e.g., through shares, a one computer system can print or read/write data via a printer or disk that is physically coupled to another computer system.
However, a problem with the current method of device sharing arises when such a peripheral device is moved to a different machine. When this happens, the user needs to reconfigure all of the machines in the network that need to use the shared device, based on its new location. This task becomes more difficult as the number of machines increases; indeed, configuring the device is often very cumbersome, sometimes requiring the installation of drivers for a printer or storage device on the machine to which the device is moved, and requiring reconfiguration of other machines in the network for some devices. Further, this is becoming a common problem because many types of peripheral devices are highly portable, e.g., typically requiring only power and a USB or IEEE 1394 interface (e.g., FireWire or I.link) coupling to move to a new machine.